Finding Your Niche - Internet Marketing Australia

The concept of niche marketing is becoming more and more popular with Internet marketers. It's not a new concept by any means - "brick and mortar" businesses have been practising this from the get-go.

It simply means specialising in one particular field that you have identified as a viable business opportunity. And it means taking the time and effort to find out what people are looking for, what they would be willing to pay for, and how you are going to reach them.

Much of this information is readily available. Take 2 broad categories that somebody operating an Internet business could fall under:

1. They sell "information products"

2. They sell tangible ("real") products.

For research on information products, a great source is Clickbank.com. With over 10,000 products available, you can list the best-selling products in each of the 9 categories. It should be possible to glean a few ideas for a niche product. Take one of the top-selling products. Do a keyword search within Clickbank on one of the keywords for that product/niche and see what other related products are being sold. If they are in the top 10 or 20, they are good sellers and it's a profitable niche. There should be plenty of material here to supply ideas for a new product. And of course you can promote these products yourself and earn commission.

For tangible products, a great source of information is Amazon.com. They have a very impressive range of categories and sub-categories and for each category they have a ranking system. So you can see first-hand what Internet shoppers are buying and you can see what there is a demand for.

Armed with this information, you can go and sell or promote similar items on your own website. Then your only concern is getting the shoppers to see you. It may not be true that "If you build it, they will come" but if you can get them to come, there's a good chance that they will purchase.

Getting traffic to your website is fine, but if the visitors are just going to have a quick browse around, you are no better off. But when you have products on display that you know are flying off the shelves elsewhere, you are on to a winner. What good is it, if you get 500 visitors a day, and your click through rate is down on the floor. When you have a specific niche that you're marketing to, you will have a much better chance of converting the visitor to a buyer.

Of course, search engine ranking and optimisation play a huge part in making your business "visible". Just as in real life, the business needs to be in the path of much traffic. However, a discussion of the various techniques used is way beyond the scope of this article. Decide on your niche, get to know it as well as you can then go and capitalize on it. It's the difference between using a scattergun and a straight-shooter.